The Technology That Will Make Us Forget (Again)
Teacher famously wrong about technology.
April 2, 2026
"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them."
--Socrates, in Plato's Phaedrus, 275a, c. 370 BCE
The concern was well articulated, the argument was coherent, but the lens of history suggests that Socrates was wrong.
Socrates was worried that something would be lost if people turned to writing, the power of recall, the ready allegories and philosophical lessons buried in the mythos of the memorized stories. But the new technology didn't produce the catastrophe its critics predicted--quite the opposite. Writing didn't destroy wisdom at all--but it changed how knowledge accumulated, spread, and built on itself. The Reformation. The Scientific Revolution. The novel. The law. These are not the outputs of a civilization that forgot how to think because they couldn't recite Homer from memory.
The current AI pushback is Phaedrus with better hardware.
Barcaui's 2025 randomized controlled trial, "ChatGPT as a Cognitive Crutch," found that students who used ChatGPT while studying scored lower on retention tests than those who didn't. Socrates would have nodded. But the study measured retention--the skill the previous era valued. It didn't ask whether those students could synthesize, compare, or build on what they found. It tested for the old mastery in the presence of the new tool--and found that the old mastery eroded. That's not a failure of the tool--that's the definition of a transition.
The fear structure is identical: the new tool will destroy something essential. This time it's creativity, expertise, the ability to think through hard problems without a machine doing it for us. The concern is genuine. The argument is coherent. History has a strong prior on whether it's right.
This pattern of preferring the old mastery didn't stop with the Greeks, of course.
When the printing press arrived, Erasmus--himself one of the most prolific writers in Europe, who understood exactly what the press had done for his own reach--complained in his Adages that printers were filling the world with books:
"Not just trifling things (such as I write, perhaps), but stupid, ignorant, slanderous, scandalous, raving, irreligious and seditious books."
The flood was real, but the press gave Europe the Reformation, and the Reformation gave Europe two centuries of religious war, and from that wreckage came the Enlightenment, and from the Enlightenment came most of what we think of as the modern world. Messy. Violent. Transformative in ways nobody predicted and nobody fully controlled.
Movies corrupted public morals. Especially the young. The Production Code--Hollywood's self-censorship regime, enacted in 1930 under pressure from religious groups and moral reformers--was the institutional expression of that panic. Film survived, thrived, and became one of the defining art forms of the 20th century.
Talkies killed art. This was the sincere view of people who loved what silent film had achieved--but nobody banned silent film. You can still make one, of course, but almost nobody does. Charlie Chaplin held out. City Lights (1931) was a silent film years after talkies had taken over. Modern Times (1936) was a hybrid. When he finally made The Great Dictator (1940)--his first true talkie--it became one of the most effective political films ever made. The technology didn't kill the art form. It changed what mastery looked like.
Television was a vast wasteland. Harlan Ellison called it the glass teat--a nation nursing from a screen, passive and dependent. He wasn't entirely wrong about the content. He was wrong about the conclusion. The glass teat produced Edward R. Murrow, Babylon 5, the moon landing in real time, and 60 years of documentary journalism that changed what citizens could know about their governments.
Video games caused violence. The studies, reliably, did not support this. The industry is now larger than film and music combined.
The internet destroyed attention spans, enabled unprecedented misinformation, and fragmented culture along fault lines that may not heal. Some of this is real. The catastrophists predicted the end of reading. Reading is not over; it changed form.
Wikipedia would destroy expertise. Anyone could edit it, therefore nothing could be trusted. The critics were judging it by the wrong standard. Wikipedia was never meant to be the final word--it's the beginning of the inquiry, not the end. Britannica was the same; nobody cited it in a PhD thesis, you used it to get oriented and find the real sources. A 2005 Nature study found Wikipedia's accuracy within striking distance of Britannica on science topics--3.9 errors per article vs 2.9. And Wikipedia pointed you to primary literature at a scale and speed Britannica never could. The critics predicted epistemic collapse. What happened instead was that Encyclopaedia Britannica went out of print in 2012.
The engagers won. Not by dismissing the risks, but by grappling with the new technology and incorporating it into a new style of thinking.
Chaplin made the best argument for silent film by refusing to abandon it for a decade--and then he made The Great Dictator. The Wikipedia editors who built citation standards were responding to a real problem about accuracy and accountability.
The people who learned what the new tool was actually good for--rather than measuring it against what the old tool did--shaped what came next.
The struggle was never against the new technology. It was the struggle to learn it--to reshape how we think rather than insist the old patterns are how thinking has to work.
Socrates was wrong about writing. To his credit, the true power of writing wasn't obvious until the institutions built around it emerged--and those probably won't be obvious this time around either.
The argument Socrates made against writing--that it would produce the appearance of wisdom without the reality--is one of the most quoted passages in the Western philosophical tradition.
Yet we only know the passage because Plato wrote it down anyway. The irony is the argument.
James is a senior software engineer who chose to engage. This post was written in concert with Claude--Plato would have understood the impulse, even if Socrates wouldn't have approved. He publishes weekly at waypoint.henrynet.ca.